Women Can Now Play in the Virtual NHL

Thanks to the persistency of a 14 year old girl named Lexi Peters, gamers can now create a custom female hockey player in the new NHL 12 game. In the past, gamers could create a male hockey player and customize it to look like them, but they never had the option to make a female character. Lexi played her brother all the time on NHL 11 but she eventually got frustrated because she had to play as a boy. She finally had enough and decided to write a letter to EA Sports COO Peter Moore, saying that the exclusion of women was, “Unfair to women and girl hockey players around the world.” Moore eventually brought this up with the executive producer David Littman. Both of them agreed that Peters was right and they quickly decided to incorporate female customizable players. Due to Peters’ persistency she not only brought women into the game, but EA Sports decided to use her face as the default female hockey player.
This may seem like a minute story on the scale of society, but it’s actually pretty significant because this is one of the first sport video games to incorporate women. Yes, there are no women in the NHL (but there have been one or two to play in pre-season games) but why shouldn’t they be incorporated into a video game? Or at least given the option to create a female athlete? After all, if boys are given the chance to feel like they’re playing hockey against NHL superstars, why shouldn’t women be given the same opportunity? This just goes to show that gender roles are starting to shift in society and women are still fighting for social equality whether it be in sports or video games.
This could open the doors for other popular game titles to incorporate female athletes. Among the mainstream sports like, basketball, baseball, hockey and football, I think NHL 12 is the only EA Sports video game to incorporate a female option when creating a character. This is probably due to the absence of female athletes in the MLB, NHL, NBA and NFL but young girls should have the option to create a character that looks like them and be able to play against their sport heroes. With the large population of female basketball players, it’s a surprise that there’s no WNBA video game. I’m sure young girl basketball players would like to play in the virtual NBA against their favorite stars too, hopefully one day this will be a reality. Thanks to Lexi Peters, female hockey players can now play in the virtual NHL and hopefully we’ll see this transfer over into other sport video game titles.

Travis Benson
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http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/How-a-14-year-old-girl-made-NHL-video-game-histo?urn=nhl-wp12363